Goldman Sachs has left the R3 distributed ledger technology consortium it helped to found two years ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street titan was one of nine original members of R3, which has since seen its ranks swell to more than 70 of the financial services industry’s biggest players.

Goldman let its membership lapse as of 31 October, according to the Journal. Instead, the bank will focus its blockchain efforts on internal development and investments in specialists. It has already made multi-million dollar bets on two startups in the field: Circle and Digital asset Holdings.

In a statement, R3 tells Finextra: “As with any project of this scale and scope, we always expected the make-up of the consortium to change over time.

“Developing technology like this requires dedication and significant resources, and our diverse pool of members all have different capacities and capabilities which naturally change over time.”